Outsourcing marketing - the key to passive income? 🔑

You said that that monitoring and tweaking ads took passion and attention from you, so you can stay competitive. I dont think a marketing agency will pay the needed passion and attention to make the ads work as you expect.

You know your business and customers and probably thats why you were able make those ads work well.

Advertising on social networks or search engines is hard these days. There are a lot of competitors. Most advertisers dont expect to make money right away, instead they invest money in creating a user base or email list that they can use again to drive sales. Others are spending money and creating contests or deals to capture those potential customers, instead of sending the traffic directly to the main shop.

Only few advertisers are able to make money directly from ads, without other techniques to capture emails and contacts that they can use later to pursue them to convert to customers.

Thats why you need passion, attention, and good knowledge of your product and customers to get to that point. And you reached it, which means that you product is good and appealing to potential customers, and that you was creative enough to set up the right ads and right campaigns to be able to make profit right away, without email lists and other techniques ( which are also boring ).

I think that you need to continue to work on ads, with the aim to lower the time spent on these, trying to automate as much as possible. Ad networks offers a lot of automation in their ad serving process, since you are an automation guru you should know how to take advantage of those to get results with less time invested.

I was in this place too. I had a product which I promoted on Google. I was spending few hours every morning to analyze the results, tweak the campaigns, create new ads, and thinking to implement other techniques to get more out of the traffic brought. Finally, I got bored and decided that I have to spend less time with this, to be able to spend more on developing the product.

What I did ? I set the campaigns with automated bidding, setting only a target CPA and daily budget. For first few months it was struggling, thinking that I will have to stop them someday, but I didnt, I let the campaigns run for few more months. At some point, they were starting to work and they were getting good results. After a period, they starting to eat too much money, but I let them run. After a month or two of spending much money, they started to work much better than I expected. There are periods when they are close to stop by themselves because they spend almost nothing, but after that they recover and they have periods with a very good CPA. Then the AI gets greedy and spends more but with a bad CPA, and then goes again to spending less. Everything is cyclical.

I am happy that I dont spend hours every day analyzing, tweaking and testing.

Hi!

As a marketing person, I can say with full confidence - what your goals are, are different from your agency's goals. Your goal - is to build a business (I'm not going to comment on the myth of passive income, just talking about goals here) and to bring in money for yourself. Their goal is to grow their agency.

Although having great results would be a "nice to have" for them, they get paid regardless of whether you make money or don't make money. You can outsource yes, but please I ask you, to seriously take a course in digital marketing (try Hubspot) so you can analyze campaigns at a basic level.

Controlling agencies is a task in and of itself, and it isn't as simple as "hi guys how's the campaign going?". The answer is always gonna be "everything is going okay". You're gonna be hit with a ton of bricks when they come back later and say "all the money is gone sorry bye-bye" with no other explanation other than "these things happen".

Study your agency contract. Notice, that no guarantees are ever given. That's the unfortunate basis of marketing, no one can give guarantees no matter what level the agency is at. Anyone who does give you guarantees is a terrible digital marketer.

You can outsource TIME but you shouldn't outsource EXPERTISE. If you cant judge how the campaigns are going, then you shouldn't be doing this.

Dedicate 7 days (3 hours daily) up to 21 hours total to learning digital marketing campaign evaluation. Then and only then outsource.

Goodluck!

You should partner up! Give others a piece of the cake for the work you don’t want to do.

I am a developer with a high interest in marketing.

I actually have some partnerships with people where I do the media (website + socials) and I get a percentage. Just how affiliate eg works.

Now that is not ads related, but…

Maybe this is interesting to you. Find a person or party who believe in you and what you’re making, and make them accountable to get your clients. Let them take control of your media and keep your focus at your profession.

Add a SMART-goal to it, and voila: you have a channel to get clients (… the stuff you don’t like) on a performance basis. The person or party doesn’t perform according to the specified SMART-goal? Break partnership and find another one. Try till you got the right match.

I faced something similar in this week @JasperSchoormans. My ads for ruttl were running great for a month or so. User were coming in (even paid users for that matter) but something messed up and the ads stopped performing well.

Did you try any other methods like affiliate or influencer marketing? I'm currently focusing on organic marketing, so any tips from your end would be appreiciated!

I've tried this and it didn't work out. I outsourced my cold-out reach because I am in the B2B business and after the first 3 months there were no results. $1500 down the drain, maybe it was just a bad apple but I still don't think it is the key.

These guys are spending YOUR money on ads? Do they have a track record of success with ad campaigns?

Be very careful. They will very likely burn through your cash and leave you with nothing but “sorry, your business just wasn’t good enough”, even though they started out with good intentions.

If they are investing their own cash and taking a cut of the profits from their investment, then awesome! More power to ‘em!

Great post Jasper! I am excited to see the results! Maybe you can speak about it in the next WBE Space event!

focus on the brand and the product ,don't follow the sales in the beginning

interesting approach thanks for sharing!

I'm gonna disagree with those who say there is no passive income. I have had passive income from my product for years. It's not a lot but it's still income. Other people have more impressive results.. The key to real passive income is it must involve passive marketing. Unless you can build the greatest automation ever that requires no supervision, ads* are not passive marketing. Outsourcing isn't either, since you have to continuous manage people. Social media and newsletters are also not passive.

The exception would be to outsource with the understanding that it's a one-time gig where they will produce marketing that will keep working passively for years. For example, buying 10-20 pieces of well-written content marketing. However, this can be expensive, especially for high-quality work that really understands your product, which is why I prefer to DIY when I can.

Content marketing/SEO is probably the best form of passive marketing. You won't see results immediately, but over time it will pay off if done correctly. Monica Lents has a free SEO course for devs. I really like Steph Smith's Doing Content Right.

That said, I don't know if your type of business will work well for passive marketing. You could try it. You can write, as seen with your post here. Start writing about your product. Start learning basic SEO and marketing. I can promise you, if you're a techie, it can be really fun. I never expected I'd enjoy it as much as I do. To contrast, like you, I do not enjoy ads at all.

• you relying on ads to drive traffic, ads on your site itself can be a good passive strategy

I have been thinking about this arrangement for a long time. As a builder this would be ideal for me and let me focus on what I do best.

If anyone wants to help advertise my latest project Unlocal hit me up. We could run ads and share the profits form the visitors. The app is also something you would keep coming back to so I think it could work. :)

I just launched just today on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/unlocal

This is particularly interesting to me as I tried nearly the identical thing about a year back.

I never got to the ‘selling a few grand a month’ part though. Tried going with FB ads but it totally flopped.

In hindsight it’s because I did everything wrong. My creative for my ads sucked, my website was visually unappealing, etc.

Maybe I should take another swing at it.

PS. Thanks for the quality post! It’s great seeing something very authentic/non promo-y

Sounds like a nice project with some potential, maybe don't give up on it so easily.

Concidentally I have been dealing with similar aspects for my own business lately, so I'll share my 2 cents.

While paid advertising can give you a nice instant boost, it is notoriously bad for long term sustainability while social media, if done right, can bring a lot of customers and help build relationships with them. So sounds like you have got yourself a good deal with the social media agency to cover this aspect, as long as they try to achieve organic growth and don't just pump money into paid adverts.

Also, good SEO will help a lot with that long term growth and potentially pay for itself several times.

Outsourcing marketing isn't easy as expected it involves a lot of patience, and ideas to implement in the right way.

Don't focus on sales straight away - start building a brand by printing maps and gifting them to local authorities, schools & culture centers. Don't put your big logo in the middle of the map with a huge call to action. Be patient and money will come down the line.

nice

I've come to believe that there is no such thing as passive income in the long run.

Either:
a.) Everything requires some form of upkeep, or
b.) It takes a HUGE amount of effort to close the deals/relationships that drive passive income.

Note: passive revenue is definitely possible. But not income without 1 of the 2 above.

Even in Tim Ferris' story he busted his ass for years before developing a "passive" income.

It was written to sell books, not because it's actually possible for most people.

It's really an interesting idea that you could outsource your marketing efforts. I am curious about it now. lol

But it's also crucial to find the right partner for this.

A lot of us at IH are more product or tech minded and marketing is new to many of us.

What are some things the marketers are trying? Any tips or lessons you have learned from working with them?

Hey @JasperSchoormans - this sounds like a sick project and good on you for taking a chance on those dudes starting the agency.

What’s your content marketing strategy like for blogging etc.,?

If a founder can't make progress on one or two channels, outsourcing won't fix the problem.

As a marketer myself, I agree with many points made in this discussion:
If you find an enthusiastic person (agency, freelance or in-house) and give them a share of the profits, it will work out. They will be motivated by your common success.
You will spend money instead of time which makes it less but more passive :-)

As others have pointed out: If you just find an agency and let them do whatever they like, it might backfire. It might not. But there's a chance as their and your goal aren't the same. So: give them a share, give them a chance to grow. But don't focus too much on the "passive" aspect.

Taking 3h / week for a nice income is worth it and still counts as passive for me.

My advice would be to barnacle yourself to bigger websites; etsy, not on the high street, redbubble, etc.

Then see how far you can go with outsourcing fulfilment.

From what I've read so far, it doesn't feel unreasonable to get the work down to say 5 - 10 hours a week.

I think you were right to outsource. Marketing agencies make it their duty to help businesses achieve success, because their client's success is their success.

I know this because I run a marketing agency. The more money our clients make, the more money they can pay us. It's that simple.

Lastly, being an expert in one field doesn't make you great at other things. Let the professionals handle marketing, always. You could hire a marketer in-house or outsource. Whatever you do, leave it to the professionals.

Good one!

Read about Kosovo's youth and it's potential to outsource there

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2022/04/18/kosovo-an-example-of-how-young-professionals-can-transform-the-tech-industry/?sh=188fb0fb5309

Honestly a great idea, I'm considering doing something similar. I enjoy dev far more than marketing, but I understand how important it is. Maybe its time to pay somebody to do a better job than I would